I asked Kersten England, the eldest of Lingard’s three daughters, whether her family’s character traits were recognisable in Sadie.
“I think there might be bits of us,” she said. “We were all energetic, lively, quite bright.”
Kersten described how her mother grew up in east Belfast.
Lingard’s own mother was a Christian Scientist.
Kersten said that meant her mother “always had a sense of not being either Catholic or Protestant, and being in some senses an observer of all these debates that were going on”.
The novelist spent most of her life living in Edinburgh and faced some hostility because of the issues in the books.
Kersten remembers she “had the odd razor blade through the post”.
Publishers also weren’t initially sure about the commercial prospects for the novels.
Kersten explained: “They used to say, don’t talk about sex, politics or religion. She was going for two of them.”
But the series became a huge success, selling more than 1.3 million copies worldwide.
The three other novels in the series focus on Kevin and Sadie’s lives after they leave Northern Ireland, finishing with Hostages to Fortune, published in 1976.